by K. F. Breene
“You are really hot when you’re this frightening, but we can’t stay in here, Kieran. We’re wasting time. That Demigod is doing something with spirit and I have no idea what. Soon he’ll unleash his power and I have two kids in here.”
“We fought Valens, too,” Daisy said. Mordecai gave a little yelp.
A pulse bloomed in Kieran’s middle. That was Zorn. Bria was ready to go. Boman had yet to signal, though. He needed more time.
“I hated that you were there,” Lexi told them, “and you were shielded by large groups of fresh soldiers. This is different. You will hide.”
“Can you sense anyone beyond that woman out back?” Kieran asked, time ticking away. He felt power building. Aaron was ready to make his move.
“I couldn’t earlier, but I’m too far away now to double-check.”
Kieran glanced at the kids, who were ready to fight. They had courage in spades. “Follow me.”
He stalked down the hall to the small closet between the guest bath and Lexi’s room. Lifting a little latch near the bottom, he pushed the button beneath it. The wall of linens popped forward.
“What the…” Lexi’s words died as another pulse blossomed in Kieran’s middle. Boman was in position. It was time.
Working fast now, he pulled open the hidden door, stepped in, and flicked the switches to power the room up.
“I didn’t think you needed more space in the master bedroom,” he said, glancing down the long, narrow room. “I also figured you’d appreciate it if I made some precautions in case things went poorly with my father. I didn’t think I’d need to use them after the fact.”
“Yeah, he was a good find,” Lexi said, but Kieran hadn’t heard Daisy say anything.
“Sir, we’ve got movement,” Donovan called up.
“Why didn’t you tell any of us about this?” Daisy asked. She thought she was old enough to join the battle.
“Because you’re Zorn’s star student. If you’d known about it, you would have figured out how to get in here, and then no one would be safe.” Kieran stepped out of the way. Neither of the kids moved.
“Now!” Lexi barked. The kids grudgingly shuffled forward.
“Demigod Kieran,” Donovan called, apprehension coming through the blood link.
Kieran shut the door behind Daisy, knowing they could figure out how to latch it from the inside. He shut the closet, too, and took a spare moment to grab Lexi’s upper arms and look down at her angelic face.
“I love you with everything I have,” he said, his emotions swelling like the tide. He wanted her to feel it as well as hear it. “We’re better together. But so help the heavens, if anything happens to you, I will follow you into the spirit realm and drag you back out, kicking and screaming if I must.”
A lopsided grin broke through the apprehension on her face. The kids were taken care of. Her worries were over.
His middle throbbed with the power of her magic running through their soul link. “Stay safe. You are my soul mate. That is forever.”
Her grin grew. “You say skirmish, I say practice. No one messes with my kids and gets the nice Lexi.”
Daisy
Daisy looked between all the monitors, each showing a different portion of the house, inside and outside. They could see most everything from here. Most. She’d already identified four blind spots. Zorn would probably quiz her on them when this was over.
“Why haven’t I noticed these cameras?” she asked quietly, observing the large gathering outside. She remembered how blindsided Lexi had been when the Demigod’s shadow form had shown up near the house the other night. How hard it had been to get rid of it.
She shook her head.
“This isn’t a skirmish, Mordecai. Kieran always sounds super confident even when he’s in over his head. Our people are going to get slaughtered.”
Mordecai emitted a soft growl.
“Ew. Obviously I didn’t mean for real, come on. But this is bad. They need all the help they can get.”
He moved around and bumped up against Daisy’s thigh. He was probably trying to talk to her with his weird shifter movements.
“I told you, I don’t speak canine. If you want to communicate, you have to change. Not like we need a wolf in here, anyway. This place is tiny and no one is getting in.”
A moment later, Daisy was edging away from Mordecai’s nudity. Thank God there was a blanket right on the other side of the door.
Given the battle hadn’t even kicked off yet, she quickly unlatched the door, pulled it open, and snatched a towel from the shelf.
“Wrap up, dickhead,” she said, hiding a smirk. Mordie hated when she swore at him for no reason.
“Shut the door,” he said urgently.
She turned to do exactly that when the closet door swung open. The hall light flared behind a massive shape, cutting off her field of vision. Surprise punched her, and she slapped down on the handle.
“That’s Jack,” Mordecai said.
She paused in yanking the door shut, knowing Mordie was using his shifter smelling.
Sure enough, Jack filled the doorway with his large frame and massive arms. Through the glare she could just see him blinking at her, as though he didn’t really know her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him, a small warning tickling up her spine.
“Come with me,” he said, his words wooden, his inflection off. He didn’t sound like the Jack she knew.
“Kieran put us in here…” Mordecai started, but Daisy put up her hand to stop him. Something wasn’t right.
“What are your orders?” Daisy said, dropping her hand back to the door handle. She didn’t know what was going on, but something felt off. If there was one thing Zorn constantly beat into her it was that she had excellent instincts. She should trust them at all times.
Jack reached out a hand like a Neanderthal. Like a big guy with a lot of muscle instead of a graceful shifter, waterborne or no.
Like someone would guess that was how Jack moved.
The warning screamed through her body: Now.
She slammed the door shut before fumbling with the latch. The handle turned. Daisy attempted to hold it shut, but she was no match for Jack’s muscle. It moved against her palm, then swung open with her still attached to it.
She staggered, but she was already reaching for her knife. Jack’s strong fingers curled around her wrist as she wrapped her palm around the knife hilt. He jerked her wrist away. The crack sounded bad. The pain nearly made her black out, raging up her arm and through every nerve in her body. He’d broken her wrist.
She bumped into the wall, trying to compartmentalize the pain, to get out from under it. Jack palmed her head and smashed it into the wall. Splotches of black clouded her vision and made her dizzy. Pain dominated her thoughts, blaring through her.
Mordecai screamed, not usual for him, and Daisy barely registered a huge fist reaching its zenith and crashing back down. A sickening crunch and Mordecai silently fell.
“No,” Daisy screamed, drowning in pain but struggling to the surface. “No! Mordecai!”
Jack stepped back, a bloody mallet in his hand. Something glopped off it and onto the floor.
Brains.
The word swam lazily through her mind. Terror rooted her to the spot. Anguish consumed her, and it wasn’t from her wrist or her head.
“Mordecai,” she screamed again, digging for her knife with her working left hand. But she wasn’t as diligent with her nondominant hand. She didn’t even get close to grabbing it.
Jack moved, and suddenly the back of his hand cracked across her ear and cheek, knocking her into the wall again.
Her thoughts dimmed and suddenly she was in the air, a band of steel around her middle, her body dangling from either side of his enormous arm. Tears she hadn’t realized she was crying dripped from her face as she howled silently through the pain, the horror.
Mordecai was her brother. Her lifeline. Each time she had a nightmare, he’d gently shake her awak
e and then sit up and talk with her until she felt safe to return to the darkness of her mind. Of her past. Before the Demigod, it had been just the three of them, Lexi, Mordie, and Daisy, struggling together. Mordie had been her partner in survival. Her only friend. Her only confidant. He was everything light and pure in the world. Everything good and wholesome. She’d promised him they’d train together until he was good enough to meet his pack. She’d promised she would stand by him one day when he assumed the role he’d been born to fill—the alpha.
Her actions had killed a member of her family. She’d opened the door and invited in a snake.
She didn’t deserve to live instead of her brother. Not instead of him.
“Please,” she whispered as Jack jogged her down the stairs. “Please God no,” she begged as he turned the corner to the back of the house.
A shadow down the hall froze. Daisy hadn’t even realized she was looking forward rather than backward. Even through the fog of pain and life-altering horror, a part of her mind recognized the knife throw, where it would hit. She shifted just a little so when Jack recoiled and staggered, her head wouldn’t be bashed against the wall for a second time.
Another knife, dead center. One more into his throat.
Jack gurgled up blood. His arm came loose and Daisy dropped to the floor like a rag doll. She landed on her broken wrist, and the explosion of agony shattered her. She screamed and rolled, holding her injured arm to her chest.
Move, girl! You’re free! Get moving!
Tears and blood clouding her vision, she struggled to sit.
Jack convulsed next to her, a cry of shock and renewed pain escaping him before he clutched at his neck, as though he’d only just realized he’d been wounded. The woman, who had been moving in for the kill and hadn’t seemed to care about Daisy, jerked to a stop. She straightened up woodenly, then stilled.
Daisy shakily pushed onto her knees and emptied her stomach, then pushed to standing, refusing to give up, needing to kill this bitch and get back to Mordecai.
The woman rolled her shoulders before she burst into action, slicing her knife across Jack’s throat before punching Daisy in the forehead. Daisy’s head snapped back and she was falling. Before lights out, the woman bent over to scoop her up as Jack’s movements slowed.
19
Alexis
I could’ve sworn that was Jack’s form hustling past me in the swirling mass of fog and darkness as I made it to my front yard, but his soul was…off. It felt like his, but also like someone else’s. It didn’t make sense.
Then again, I couldn’t think straight, not in this thick, soupy mass of white-tinged darkness, the moon and streetlights illuminating the fog in places. The stuff rolled and boiled around me, suffocating, messing with my mind.
“Was that Jack?” I asked Bria, her shape enlarging as it got closer, her soul identifying her. My words didn’t seem to travel as far as they should. They seemed muted. “Where’s he going?”
“This shit is a mind-fuck, am I right?” she said, stopping beside me. She was close enough that I could just make out dirt and sweat or moisture smeared across her face. “Yeah, that was Jack. He’s supposed to be meeting up with the guys and Kieran, due west of here, in the middle of the street. But I don’t know. He was acting strange earlier. I think he’s worried about the kids. Listen, we got work to do.”
She grabbed me by the arm and yanked me with her, heading toward Kieran’s house across the street. Something brushed past my leg and I jumped. I could just barely see the cat streak by.
Shadows writhed around us, and what I could only describe as a sucker punch smashed against my chest. Bria grunted at the same time, but didn’t slow, pulling me along behind her.
“That is really annoying,” she muttered, jogging now.
“Where are we going?” I asked as the ground underneath us trembled.
“We’ve dug up the cadavers I had stored in Kieran’s backyard. This potential situation is why I went with shallow graves and loose dirt. We need to get them active. Get your bearings. That Hades nut sack is about to shake this party up.”
A tremor rolled through the asphalt, followed by a small earthquake, shifting my balance. Kieran could rumble the ground with power, maybe give it a little wiggle, but this felt more like the other Demigod’s work.
The ground dropped away, giving me a moment of fright, before launching back up and knocking the soles of my feet. My knees buckled and I hit the deck, only to be shaken like a snow globe in the hands of a child. Spirit condensed around me, making me feel sluggish, followed by a blast of unspeakable terror. Fear like I’d never felt before blasted through my mind and locked up my body.
“Fight it,” Bria shouted in my ear. “That’s the Demigod’s magic. Fight the feeling. It isn’t real. If metal is thrown at you, though, run. That is real.”
She hoisted me up and dragged me along, clearly unwilling to let the manufactured terror we both felt tear her away from her duty.
“Get moving.” The cat darted in and batted at my ankles. I kicked at it. “Get going!” he said. “The troops are advancing, your Demigod is stalling for heavens only know why, and the dickhead Hades Demigod is headed for your house. This is all about to unravel.”
I repeated what the cat had said—and quickly explained who had said it.
Bria looked down in bewilderment, then stared at me for a long beat, her expression clearing to one of neutrality. She thought I was crazy.
“Fine, if it is just a voice in my head, it’s been right so far,” I yelled, stubbing my toe against something with a little give. I stepped around it, only for my other toe to hit something with no give. I fell over a curb and onto an unnaturally soggy body. “What the—”
“Hurry, we need to get souls into these bodies and get them moving,” she said, grabbing items out of a box she must’ve brought out before she’d run to find me. She handed a few of the things to me, relics attached to spirits we could call from beyond the Line. “Kieran should be keeping them busy to give us a second.”
Worry dripped through my middle—Kieran’s. A burst of emotion followed it, trailed by shock, sadness, confusion. I didn’t know what it meant.
“Something is happening,” I yelled as the ground heaved again. The need to tear at my hair in fear and scream nearly overcame me. The spirit around me felt like a shroud. The fog was too thick, cutting out my favorite sense. The sense I used as a crutch.
The sound of yelling cut through the pounding of my heart in my ears. Battle cries. Someone had given the enemy troops the go-ahead to attack.
“Go, go, go!” Bria shook me. “Focus on one spirit at a time. Focus on your job. Block out the rest.” The flame of a candle barely illuminated the fog before it went out. “Shit. My magic doesn’t like all this moisture.”
My heart rattled my ribcage wildly, responding to the magical fear even as I tried to force my mind to ignore it. Sweat joined the moisture of the fog on my skin.
“One at a time,” I said, someone’s scream renting the night. “One at a time.”
I closed my eyes, the constant press of spirit on me starting to piss me off.
Frustrated, unnaturally terrified, fucking angry, I pushed out around me, shoving the Line, the spirit, and everything else, trying to get a little breathing room, to clear a spot for myself.
“Yes!” The cat darted in, stood on its hind legs, and tried to paw at the chain of a gold necklace swinging down from my cupped hands.
“What the hell is your problem?” I ripped the necklace away.
“I can control the thought processes of the cat, but I cannot control its instincts. In this case, I need to attack that waving, dangling, sparkly chain of madness.”
I felt the soul connected to the necklace pulse, so much closer in the spirit plane than the Spirit Walker had been, as a boom of power slammed into me. The sound of waves crashing against the cliff face not far from us, unnaturally, magically loud, drowned out the battle cries and yells.
I pushed out again, this time with the magic I’d received from Kieran through the soul connection.
“Yes!” the cat yelled again, jumping at the dangling chain, doing a half backflip and landing on his feet. “That is why you choose a Demigod of a different lineage for a soul mate. I was on the fence, but now I’m a believer.”
The soul of a sleepy woman in her sixties appeared before me. I didn’t have time to explain. I thrust her into a body, clamped her soul into place, and moved on to the next as Bria started loading up weaker spirits next to me.
The souls were all easy to find, and I picked up a quick rhythm—relic, soul, body, relic, soul, body.
“You’re a machine!” the cat yelled with delight, sitting down for a moment to lick his paw. The exuberance didn’t match the lazy fur cleaning, but then, his excitement didn’t match the situation at all. He was clearly reacting to his murderous past. “I didn’t think there was any way in the great god of Hades that you’d get all this done in time, but here you are. Fantastic. Great work ethic.”
“That cat is getting on my last nerve,” I muttered.
A wave of power rolled over us, barely kept at bay by the spirit I was constantly shoving out to keep us unscathed. The ground jumped again, throwing me at a jerking body filled with an unhappy soul. Kieran had just gotten started, but I could plainly feel his impatience through both of our links—he was clearly waiting for us to get going. The enemy troops were probably almost upon us now, picking their way through the murky night, slowed by the fog—slowed but not stopped.
“You filthy, soul-stealing…” One of the spirits started before I gave it a kick with spirit.
“Yes, okay, I see what you did there,” the cat said. “Look at you improvising in a violent sort of way. I like it. You’ll get along just fine with Ares types.”